Bonn hosts 34th Silent Film Festival

The silent film Flesh and the Devil was based on a novel by German author Hermann Sundermann. The classic melodrama is still considered remarkable today because the film, starring Greta Garbo and John Gilbert, was erotically charged. The actors later became a real life couple, too.

Two years later, G. W. Pabst, whom the makers of the Bonn Silent Film Festival call a "great realist of Weimar cinema," filmed a melodrama critical of society. Siegfried Kracauer, a German writer, saw both films and wrote in 1928: "It seems lipstick was a recognized symbol of sin at the time" adding that it characterized the femme fatale in both films.

The Bonn Silent Film Festival, celebrating its 34th edition this year, is one of the most important of its kind worldwide. It has earned a reputation primarily because it not only shows silent film gems from Hollywood, Germany and other European movie nations, but from further afield, like this year's The Dancing Girl of Izu, based on a novel by Japanese Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata.

In the early 20th century, few people had the opportunity to fly to more remote regions of the world. So, silent films set in foreign lands were enormously popular, for instance the elaborately restored film Shiraz, shot in India by German director Franz Osten.

The film Opium takes the audience to India and to China, too. But unlike Shiraz, this film was produced in Neubabelsberg, Germany. "If you don't know where the work was recorded, it's hard to believe that all this - the Chinese quarter, the Indian city, the lion's jungle - was built in a Berlin suburb," one critic commented at the time.

Andre Antoine presented a less exotic world in The Swallow and the Titmouse, a story of bargemen's lives on French and Belgian canals. The producers felt the material was too meagre, too documentary, so they stopped production and the material remained uncut. It wasn't until 1984 that the film was restored and shown - a poetic masterpiece from Belgium.

The restored version of the 1929 Soviet film Fragment of an Empire premieres at the 2018 Bonn Silent Film Festival. Using cinematic formal language in all its diversity, Friedrich Ermler tells a story of war and revolution. The 1920s Russian film was one of the most innovative in the world at the time.

Films made in Germany at the time were also quite experimental. Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau's famous film adaptation of the legendary tale of Faust is a classic. The festival has included Gerhart Hauptmann's subtitles in its restored version, lines that were not shown when the film premiered.

Silent films are also about fun and laughter, so the Bonn festival is again showing the Battle of the Century starring Laurel and Hardy. A restored version ran at the 2015 Silent Film Festival. New fragments have since been discovered, so this year, the festival offers another "new" version.

The classic silent short film One Week starred Buster Keaton trying to build a house for himself and his newly-wed wife. "In retrospect, Buster Keaton was probably the most important comedy director of all," British film historian Kevin Brownlow admitted in 1997.